"Communihood:" A Less Formal or More Local Form of Community in the Age of the Internet

After more than three decades of the expansion of information technology into every aspect of human life, it is time to stop utopian or dystopian imaginings about how this new technology can fundamentally change human and social life in general and communies and neighborhoods in particular. This paper criticizes the binary and deterministic social science approaches to the effects of information technology on community and neighborhood: a binary approach in distinguishing community versus neighborhood based on their attachment to location, and a deterministic approach where information technology is seen as active while society is passive. In contrast, this paper uses the concept of Thirdspace to define "communihood" not as an alternative to previous approaches, but as an inclusive and a realistic concept that includes characteristics of both community and neighborhood. In communihood, information technology is understood not as a deterministic force, but as a facilitating tool in social communications and information sharing. After defining communihood, location-based identity, hybrid diversity, and place-based power are introduced as three main characteristics of communihood.